Monday, November 24, 2014

Precusors to Comics: The Art of Franz Masereel

FRANZ MASEREEL

Considered the greatest
twentieth-century master of the woodcut, and by many as the grandfather of the
graphic novel, Franz Masereel (1889-1972) was born in Belgium and lived
throughout Europe in the years before WWI.
Honing his craft as a graphic artist in various journals, Masereel
perfected an expressionist style influenced by contemporaries such as Delaunay,
Braque, and Marc. Additionally, his
literary influences can be seen in the numerous illustrations he did for
authors such as Thomas Mann, Stephen Sweig, and Emile Zola. Masereel emerged as a pacifist in WWI with
strong Communist sympathies—ideals embodied in his most ambitious works, his
so-called “novels” in woodcuts. These
works tell visual narratives about capitalism, man’s isolation in his modern
metropolis, the decadence of the bourgeois, and the rising might of the
proletariat. His most famous works are A Passionate Journey (1919), an
allegorical narrative of modern man’s existence, and The City, a “vision in woodcuts,” which documents the decline and
eventual fall of a Berlin-like metropolis.
Though he sided with no one political movement, his works were warmly
championed by Socialists and banned by the rising Nazi movement (forcing him to
flee Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation).
However, his humanity and sheer artistic appeal make it impossible to
read his works as propaganda. The
pioneering graphic novelist Will Eisner (The
Spirit, A Contract With God) cited him as a seminal influence on his work,
and one of the first true visionaries of the comic book form—though he never
viewed his work in this medium. His
influence has been further cited by notable comic book critic, Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics), and undoubtedly
influenced Marjane Satrapi’s woodcut-style drawings in Persepolis I & II.

Perhaps his most
universally appealing work is the compact, but sprawling narrative of The City (1925), which takes the reader through a bustling European metropolis
in the years after WWI. The work is
prefaced by a quote from Walt Whitman: “This is the city and I am one of the
citizens,/Whatever interests the rest interests me.” Fittingly, the first panel shows a man sitting down amidst
flowers, contemplating the dread abyss of smokestacks and skyscrapers that
swallows the horizon. Though the
“vision in woodcuts” has no story per se, it does flit us from one souring
image of modern life to another, creating a loose narrative of oppression,
isolation, and bourgeois decadence.
Every aspect of the city interests Masereel as an artist, from the small
apartment of a struggling family to the posh bordellos of the rich and
famous. Yet the most prominent feature
of The City is the artwork itself,
starkly black and white images which deftly portray caricature, terror,
sublimity, and beauty. You can find the
entire series at: http://newpartisan.com/images/masereel/index7.html.

In one of the opening
images, we see the sprawling cityscape—building climbing atop building,
blotting out land and sky. Yet Masereel
is alive to the human presence of this towering terrors, the peep-hole windows
allowing us to see the citizens at their daily routine. A young woman works at her sewing while the
man beneath her broods. Other windows
reveal a woman dressing—bare bottom displayed to all lookers—a young couple
amidst a passionate embrace, and other faces, expressionless, peering back at
us. This image of the city stands out
as one of Masereel’s most iconic of the modern city—a voyeuristic display of
exhibition and isolation.In another representative image, we see
demonstrators being forcibly driven off by soldiers, a scene that echoes the
events of pre-Communist Russia, particularly the peaceful protest of 1905, when
soldiers opened fire and killed hundreds of civilians. Masereel documented the protests, speeches,
and common humanity of people trying to rise above the metropolis, many of them
in quasi-journalistic style. Here we
see terror of the government, depicted simply as a cloud of gunfire confronting
the terrified and dispersing crowd.
Only one man stands defiantly to greet them, taking aim at the amorphous
mass—a willing martyr for the cause.
Like Marx, Masereel seems to have felt that “Modern bourgeois society…is
like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether
world whom he has called up by his spells” (The Communist Manifesto,
8). The decline of “the city” was
inevitable in his mind, as the people would soon wrest the power from its
greedy, smoke-like tentacles.

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About Me

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Languages at East Central University. I teach courses in composition, British literature, poetry, Humanities, and comic books. I earned my BA and MA from the University of Tulsa, and my PhD from Miami University in Ohio. I also write novels, short stories, and articles on literature and teaching.